CALL FOR NEW WORKS!!!

NOW! A Journal of Urgent Praxis is accepting new submissions in response to our contemporary political moment. We are seeking films, texts, images, poems, GIFs, and collages that respond to and/or express reactions, feelings, frustrations, and thoughts about these dark political times. Notes on resistance and visions of hope are all welcome. We encourage especially the creation of new works made with the immediacy and urgency that these times call for.Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis for NOW! Journal.

IGNITE THE RIGHT!!!

A powerful tribute to the students who stood their ground against the "many sides" of white supremacy in Charlottesville. More from Lydia Moyer: vimeo.com/goodfornow

Fight the Right! Ignite the Right! New GIFs made in urgent response to the act of terrorism in Charlottesville, VA. NOW! is the time for the radical reply! (To submit new GIFs or short video works for consideration, send to: santiagoalvarezlives@gmail.com

"NOTES ON PRECARITY"

Hellraiser by Alex Johnston

On this May Day, a day in which we honor liberatory struggles across history and around the world, NOW! Journal presents a series of short works: “Notes on Precarity.” These are films made in response to America's new, more nakedly malevolent political regime, but also to the deep structures of inequality and violence which are the purview of no single political party or reckless xenophobic demagogue. There is mourning in these works, ennui, and a sense of overwhelming odds. But there is also reflection, conversation, action, and ultimately, resistance. A famous Wobbly slogan tells us, DON’T MOURN ORGANIZE! Fine advice indeed, but as these films show us, the two processes need not be mutually exclusive. Mourning brings compassion, empathy, and solidarity. Organizing is its articulation, its praxis. So on this May Day, we say: MOURN! ORGANIZE!

Notes to Self is an ongoing series of videos documenting a simple, repetitive act as a way to mimic our fleeting engagement with social media status updates. Fragments of text, in the form of notes to myself, are set on fire with varying degrees of success. Unlike social media updates, the fate of these updates are controlled and finite, existing only for a few seconds before being completely destroyed. The notes, which range from humourous reminders and revelations to recollections about larger societal events, are simple in both form and execution, allowing for a critical and considered viewing response. More Notes to Self http://cbattle.com/notes-to-self/

Gray & Okatsuka's collaboration is a meditation on the collapse of the American Dream. When the promise of a brighter future seems far out of reach and underemployment is all one has to hold on to, you have the new America without the dream. More from Ryan and Atsuko: http://www.ryanharpergray.com/, http://www.atsukookatsuka.com/

giving myself a reason to scream but not cry examines the correlation between catharsis and protest. Part self-help exercise, part coping mechanism, part instruction set for the inept protestor, this video depicts how both protest and catharsis have potential to be moot points. The work was born out of a deep distaste for the contemporary political state, as well as feeling stifled by my own anger and the inability to feel as though I can enact positive influence beyond myself. The Governing body has an alienating hold that pushes its subjects toward a sentiment of hopelessness. As a result our hopes shift away from changing the system or building a new one and more toward “something” being able to change what’s around us. Our culture’s obsession with notions of the apocalypse, collapse or disaster is the single tangible way we see the ability to witness dramatic change, so we fantasize about "acts of god" as the only possible way we will ever see any transformation. I am convinced that people don’t actually want to witness the apocalypse, but that they want to witness change on a scale Governments would never allow for. Our bureaucratic processes slow down and remove us from any direct elements of change and, as a result, a boiling over of frustration becomes the dominant ideology. This piece deals with the willingness to break and destroy as a vital part of implementing change while indulging in the catharsis of witnessing that action. More from Adán De La Garza: http://adandelagarza.com/

THE PEOPLE UNITED by Alex Johnston

UNTHINKING FASCISMby Ian Alan Paul

Since this Fall I've been part of the faculty at a small university in the West Bank of Palestine, a unique and unquestionably defamiliarizing vantage point from which I've somewhat obsessively been following the U.S. election and its fallout from afar. Every morning I swipe across the surface of my phone on my way to work as we pass through one checkpoint and then another, eventually driving along the graffitied separation wall itself as bright pixels blink in and out of existence with each subtle drag of my finger. The screen scrolls past countless debates between friends on facebook concerning what speculative direction Trump's authoritarianism will first follow, past photos of demonstrations filled with tear gas and banners and masks and police that at some point become indistinguishable and blend together with one another, past colorful animated memes of Trump, of Hillary, and of exasperated liberal celebrities still unable to come to terms with an outcome that even the victors seem to not have fully anticipated. The other day, just after I wrapped up a lecture on the politics of reenactment and brought the class to a close, several of my students approached me and asked about how I was responding to Trump's election, and specifically inquired as to whether I thought he was a fascist. It's a term that has widely circulated, off of tongues and across wireless networks alike, seemingly without much consideration or constraint in the days that have followed November 8th. Both online as well as in the classrooms, cafes, and bars of the West Bank, related and unrelated to the U.S. elections, everyone seems to be wondering what it means to rethink fascism today.

DON'T NORMALIZE by Kelly Sears

In the end I wasn't able to give them a simple answer, largely because I haven't reached any firm conclusions myself, but nonetheless we were able to have a generative discussion regarding what fascism was, and how we could potentially begin to think about it in new fashions today. After they had left to catch the bus home, I felt the need to return to the work of Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish philosopher who was forced to flee Nazism and soon after emerged as one its fiercest and most prolific critics. She's a scholar I've studied but have never formally written about, but nonetheless the force of ideas and way of thinking about the world left a lasting impression on me since the first time I read her work as a young college student myself. This felt need to return to her writing didn't come to the surface because I think Trump is necessarily a fascist, but because Arendt's critique of fascism seems to remain provocative and, unfortunately, in some way apropos to the present we slowly finding ourselves all waking up within. As I recall, her critique takes on two different forms which are interconnected and rely upon one another, and interestingly they aren't political or economic in nature but rather mobilize the human condition itself as their basis. Now, I think it's perhaps worthwhile to attempt to return to her arguments again to see if we can potentially put her particular way of thinking about fascism to new use.

SHUT IT DOWN by Kelly Sears

Her first claim regarding the banality of fascism is probably most familiar, although unfortunately it's too often passed off as a clichéd platitude. When Arendt describes the banality of fascism, she's not making a claim regarding the boring or everyday qualities it takes on (although fascism unquestionably also operates in this way), but rather she is trying to make clear fascism's profound disinterestedness and inattentiveness to the world it inhabits. In other words, her first charge against fascism can be reframed as an accusation that fascism is guilty of failing to think. Her argument here relies upon a particular definition of thinking, one that differentiates itself from the routine ways we engage with the world that are often defined by bureaucratic or administrative tasks that become normalized unthought actions repetitively taken without consideration. For Arendt, thinking was in contrast about wrestling with the plurality and diversity of the world, of confronting, relentlessly again and again, what is unknown and is to some degree perpetually unknowable in other people. Interestingly, this also means thinking with oneself, of having a conversation with an internal other that allows you to critically reflect on your own actions and ways of being in the world. Ultimately, the fascist fails to think, and is thus banal, because they don't see this otherness that is ineradicably part of humanity and its radical plurality. As a result of failing to see this otherness in others and in themselves, they are in some way removed from the very thing which Arendt argues makes us human: our capacity to think. It's a beautiful and incredibly rich argument, and I think is something we should continue taking up in the present as we think about Trumpism, but this is only the first part of her critique.

NO WALLS by Alex Johnston

Arendt's second and possibly more important claim regarding fascism concerns how we should treat fascists when they put their beliefs into practice through the exclusion and, at the extreme, extermination of those that they refuse to share the world with. In rejecting the inherent plurality of humanity as well as refusing to think it, the fascist claims the world for themselves and denies any other person's right to it. Just as Arendt thinks that it is the act of thinking that makes us human because of the way that it unavoidably brings us into relation with others, she also thinks that the act of inhabiting the world and necessarily coexisting with different others makes up the very basis of our human condition, of what it means to be human. In fact, for Arendt, thinking is only possible because of this plurality, this unavoidable and necessary encounter with otherness, even if it was with the otherness that can only be found within oneself. And so when fascists refuse to share the world with others, Arendt claims that they are refusing to be part of that which makes them human and are thus are excluding themselves from the human condition and from humanity itself. In other words, when fascists refuse others, they give up the very thing that supports the claim that anyone else should be expected to share the world with them.

"PC" Culture by Alex Johnston

What does this all mean for the present? As I said at the beginning, I hesitate to say that Trump and all of his followers are fascists or should be blanketly treated as such. However, I do think that we should respond to any claim that immigrants, or Muslims, or queers, or women are somehow not eligible to fully share the world with us with the same critical ferocity that Arendt responded to the Nazis with. Whether in Standing Rock, or in New York, or in Flint, or in Ferguson, or in Jerusalem, or in Ramallah or in Istanbul, or in Cairo, or in Aleppo, or in Calais, or in Johannesburg, or in Berlin, or in Moscow, or in Hong Kong, or in Ayotzinapa, if anyone chooses to exclude others from the ineradicable human right to plural coexistence, then we should treat them as if they themselves have forfeited their right to our coexistence with them. Arendt's critique should ultimately be understood as a demand that we must incessantly think, to see others anew in every encounter with them and to not let the banal impinge upon our capacity to do so. It is a demand to understand that our coexistent plurality must be the very foundation of our politics, ethics, and ways of living, being, and resisting in this world. It is a demand to see the fact of our coexistence as also being the basis of our equality, the thing that grants us our equal right to exist with one another. Finally, and perhaps most urgently, it is a demand to radically refuse those that have unthinkingly refused others.

Ian Alan Paul (b. 1984) is a transdisciplinary artist, theorist, and curator. His practice includes the production of experimental documentary, critical fiction, and media art, aiming to produce novel conditions for the exploration of contemporary politics, ethics, and aesthetics in global contexts. Ian is currently part of the faculty at Al-Quds Bard in the West Bank, and has previously taught courses at UC San Diego, the American University in Cairo, the San Francisco Art Institute, and UC Santa Cruz. He has lectured and exhibited internationally, and has had his work featured in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, Art Threat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, Art Info, and C Magazine, among others. He received his PhD in Film and Digital Media Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2016 and his MFA and MA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011. A portfolio of his work can viewed online at: www.ianalanpaul.com